cognition and development: Piagets stages of intellectual development Flashcards
Define Piaget’s stages of intellectual development.
Piagets theory that we develop our intellectual abilities through going sequentially through 4 stages, each stage characterised by different levels of reasoning ability (exact ages of stages differ)
What are the four stages of intellectual development and their ages?
sensorimotor stage, pre-operational stage, state of concrete operations, stage of formal operations
Give the key features of the sensorimotor stage.
0-2 years
focus is on physical sensations
develop co-ordinations of physical actions
learn to understand people as a separate object
has object permanence
What is object permanence and how did Piaget test for it? (How do we know when children have developed this ability?)
ability to realise an object still exists while out of sight, before this children will lose interest as soon as an abject disappears so will not reach for it when outside of visual field
What are the key characteristics of the pre-operational stage?
has language and is mobile, lacks reasoning so makes characteristic errors
What is conservation? Give two examples of how Piaget tested for conservation abilities
cannot do in pre-operational stage, mathematical understanding that quantity remains the same when appearance of something changes, awareness of conservation of different types develop at different ages
Piaget tested through children stating amount of water in one glass than another which they got wrong
What is egocentrism? How did they test whether children are egocentric at this age?
the ability to only see the world from our own point of view, tested this by asking children to describe what a doll sees (instead of what they see) even when previously seen from a dolls angle
What is class-inclusion? Give one way they can test for class-inclusion in pre-operational stage children.
the ability to recognise classed of objects have subcategories, pre-operational children cannot generally show class inclusion and they are unable to place things in more than one class simultaneously. Piaget + Inhelder 1964 tested 7-8 year olds and asked if there were more dogs than animals , all children responded dis when there were 5 dogs and 2 cats
What are the key characteristics of the concrete operational stage?
can preform conversation and class inclusion tasks, improved reasoning abilities when externally verifiable, still struggle with abstract ideas or imagine objects/situations they cannot see
What are the key characteristics of the formal operational stage?
Give one example of how psychologists have tested for formal reasoning abilities in the formal operational stage.
ao3: What contradictory research is there for egocentrism? Why is this important?
ao3: How could you counteract the criticism of several aspects of the pre-operational stage having contradictory research? Why is this important?
ao3: How might we explain Piaget seemingly getting the ages of each stage wrong?
ao3: How did Piaget get it wrong regarding domain-specific vs domain-general cognitive development?
